Ashburn colocation: what capacity, cost, and availability really mean.

How much does colocation cost in Ashburn and Northern Virginia?

Recent quotes we received for Northeast ran $200 to $240 per kW per month for up to 500 kW, falling to $165 to $205 above 1 MW. CBRE's published asking band for Ashburn and Northern Virginia is $190 to $235 per kW per month for 250 to 500 kW.

Smaller deployments cost more per kW. These are recent quotes we received, not a statement that space is available. Cross-connects, remote hands and one-time setup are extra. Operators often give 2–3 free months on a new term. See every region's quote ranges.

Ashburn cabinet and cage prices

Smaller deployments are priced per cabinet or per cage rather than per kW. These are not provider offers, and a building on this page is not a claim that space is available in it.

Taxes, cross-connects, bandwidth and one-time charges are extra. How power is billed is covered in how colocation power is billed.

What the total monthly Ashburn cost includes

How long Ashburn space takes to deliver

Market-wide vacancy does not tell you whether a specific facility can deliver your density, cooling and date. The sourcing profiles below are search parameters, not representations of current inventory.

Get Ashburn colocation prices for your setup

Tell us the racks, power and timing you need. A scout comes back with matching Ashburn options and quoted prices.

Who is actually plugged in across Northern Virginia

A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.

The most connected buildings here

From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.

Why Ashburn is still the first market many teams check

Ashburn sits inside Northern Virginia's unusually dense data center and fiber ecosystem. For a buyer, that can mean broad carrier choice, established cloud connectivity, deep operator experience, and multiple ways to design for redundancy. It is especially useful when latency, interconnection, and access to East Coast users matter.

That depth does not make capacity easy to secure. CBRE reported that Northern Virginia reached 4,182 MW of inventory in Q1 2026, yet only 10.8 MW was available. The market vacancy rate was 0.3%. Those figures cover the wider Northern Virginia market, but they capture the practical Ashburn problem: new supply is being absorbed almost as quickly as it arrives.

Market figures: CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026. Loudoun County also describes Data Center Alley as the world's largest concentration of data centers on its official data center page.

kW and MW, in plain English

Colocation capacity is usually discussed in committed electrical power, not square feet. One megawatt equals 1,000 kilowatts. The amount you need depends on the equipment load, redundancy design, rack density, cooling approach, and expected growth.

What drives price in Ashburn

A monthly price per kW is useful for planning, but it is not the whole deal. Two quotes can use the same headline rate and still produce very different total costs.

• Size and commitment: larger power blocks can receive better unit economics, but they carry a larger minimum commitment.
• Term and ramp: longer terms can improve pricing. A staged power ramp can reduce early spend if the operator accepts it.
• Density and cooling: high-density racks, liquid cooling, or containment can narrow the facility set and add engineering costs.
• Redundancy: distribution design, backup architecture, and maintenance expectations influence both fit and cost.
• Network: cross-connects, carrier ports, cloud on-ramps, and diverse entrances are often quoted separately.
• One-time charges: installation, cages, cabinets, cabling, migration support, and custom security can materially change year-one spend.
• Escalators and renewals: annual increases and renewal language can outweigh a small difference in the opening rate.

What "available" should mean in your shortlist

A useful availability answer includes the quantity, delivery date, density, redundancy, physical layout, expansion path, and any work required before service starts. A broad statement such as "we have capacity in Ashburn" is not enough to build a project plan.

1. Confirm the initial committed kW and expected ramp by date.
2. Document the power density required per cabinet or row.
3. Define network carriers, cloud connections, route diversity, and cross-connect count.
4. Set compliance, physical security, access, and support requirements.
5. Identify future expansion and whether adjacent capacity is contractual or only aspirational.
6. Normalize recurring and one-time charges across every option.

When Ashburn may not be the right answer

Ashburn can be the strongest ecosystem and still be the wrong project fit. If the deployment needs a very large contiguous block, an aggressive delivery date, a different risk profile, or better unit economics than the current market supports, nearby or secondary markets deserve a parallel look. In Maryland, Frederick County is the large campus to test for a later date. Montgomery County suits a second site near people in the Maryland suburbs. Baltimore covers the BWI corridor. The comparison should include latency, network cost, staff access, workload dependencies, and migration risk, not power price alone.

Northern Virginia by the numbers

Ashburn sits inside the largest data center market on earth, and the scale is worth stating precisely because it explains both the depth of choice and the difficulty of securing capacity.

Sources: CBRE on Northern Virginia extending its lead and CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026. Land is anchored on two disclosed 2026 trades: Amazon at about $427.3M for roughly 122 acres, and Starwood Capital at $166.8M for 42 acres in Fairfax County. Power bands and queue lengths vary by substation and by how load is staged, so confirm both for a specific site.

The submarkets, and why they are not interchangeable

Treating Northern Virginia as one market is the most common planning error. Price, availability and delivery date differ enough between corridors that the choice of submarket is often a bigger decision than the choice of provider.

Emerging submarket activity and the zoning constraints in Loudoun and Prince William per CBRE on record-low vacancy and emerging Northern Virginia growth areas.

Why the power queue decides your project plan

In Northern Virginia the scarce resource is not land, buildings or capital. It is an energized connection, and the wait for one is long enough to govern the entire schedule.

Dominion Energy's transmission upgrades support record absorption, but its batching system continues to extend delivery timelines for new projects. A four to six year horizon for new large load means the practical question is not whether a provider has space, but whether they already hold energized capacity or a firm position in the queue. Those are very different products sold at similar-sounding rates.

What Northern Virginia gives you that other markets do not

The premium here buys specific, measurable things. It is worth paying when the workload uses them, and worth avoiding when it does not.

• Interconnection density: more exchange points, carrier cross-connects and cloud on-ramps than almost any location globally, which lowers the cost and latency of reaching networks and clouds.
• Operator choice: enough competing facilities that a normalized bid process produces real price tension, even in a tight market.
• Redundancy design options: multiple diverse buildings and entrances within a short distance, which makes active-active and campus-diverse architectures practical.
• Deep operational labor pool: mature staffing for remote hands, smart hands and migration support.
• Predictable engineering: operators here have delivered high-density and liquid-ready builds repeatedly, which reduces execution risk on unusual requirements.

If your workload is latency-sensitive, interconnection-heavy or needs East Coast user proximity, those advantages are real and the pricing follows from them. If it is a batch or archival workload that simply needs cheap, reliable megawatts, you are paying for capabilities you will not use. The pricing benchmarks page shows what the alternative markets cost on land, power and interconnect queue.

The local politics are now part of the risk

Data centers are a large enough share of the Northern Virginia tax base that public policy is a live variable in a long-term plan. In Loudoun County, data centers are expected to contribute nearly half of local property tax revenue in 2026. That fiscal dependence cuts both ways for a tenant.

On one hand, local governments have a strong incentive to keep the sector healthy. On the other, concentration has produced real zoning and entitlement resistance in Loudoun and Prince William, which CBRE cites as limiting the market's ability to capture demand. For a buyer, the practical effect is that pipeline announcements in these counties deserve more scepticism than elsewhere, and a firm delivery commitment matters more than a large announced pipeline.

What has been announced in Northern Virginia

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below links to a published report that states it, and was checked against at least one other independent report before it was written down.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record below and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Every Northern Virginia facility we track

317 data centers across Northern Virginia, from our verified inventory. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.

Operators with the most facilities here: Digital Realty (53), STACK Infrastructure (27), Equinix (24), CloudHQ (22), QTS (16), CyrusOne (15), NTT Global Data Centers (13), Iron Mountain Data Centers (10), Rowan Digital Infrastructure (9), TA Digital Group (9).

Where they cluster: Ashburn (101), Sterling (68), Manassas (55), Culpeper (10), Gainesville (10), Chantilly (9).

The largest buildings coming to this market

157 facilities here are under construction or planned. These are the ten largest by floor area, and a size on file is not a promise of a delivery date.

From our verified inventory rather than from a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. These buildings are verified, which is not the same as their space being available: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See what a verified building does and does not mean.

What the public construction record shows in Northern Virginia

Loudoun County building permits plus Virginia air permits in the Northern Virginia counties. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.

Operators appearing by name: Amazon Web Services (27), CyrusOne (26), QTS (14), Vantage Data Centers (5), Equinix (4), STACK Infrastructure (3), AT&T (2), EdgeCore (2).

The filings that state a capacity

Most permits never mention megawatts. These do, and the basis matters: a figure the applicant stated for the project is a different claim from a generator nameplate, which is backup plant rather than sellable load.

The most recent filings on the record

Collected from Loudoun County LandMARC permit records, Virginia DEQ air permit records and Fairfax County PLUS planning records. A permit or air-register entry documents a site or proposed work. It does not establish current construction or available space, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.